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Microsoft: Ransomware groups, nation-states exploiting Atlassian Confluence vulnerability

criticalRansomware exploited in the wildimportance 60CVE-2022-26134

Vulnerabilities mentionedAll →

CVEVulnerabilityCVSSEPSSFlagsAffectedExposurePublished
CVE-2022-26134
Unauthenticated OGNL Injection RCE in Atlassian Confluence Server/Data Center

Atlassian Confluence Server and Data Center contain an unauthenticated remote code execution flaw caused by improper neutralization of expression-language (OGNL) input (CWE-917): an attacker with network access to the application can submit a crafted request that is evaluated as an expression and executed by the server. Successful exploitation lets a remote, unauthenticated attacker run arbitrary code with the privileges of the Confluence process, without any credentials. All organizations running self-managed Confluence Server or Data Center are affected, particularly instances exposed to the internet; Confluence Cloud is not listed among the affected products. Exploitation is confirmed in the wild: the flaw was added to CISA's KEV on 2022-06-02 with ransomware use marked as known, and EPSS assigns a 100% probability of exploitation within 30 days (100th percentile). CVSS has not yet been scored in this data, but the KEV listing and known ransomware use make unpatched, internet-facing instances a top-priority patching target.

Do: Immediately upgrade to the patched Confluence release specified in Atlassian's 2022-06-02 security advisory, and until patched follow the CISA required action to block all internet traffic to and from affected instances. Because in-the-wild exploitation and ransomware use are confirmed, also hunt for compromise indicators on both patched and unpatched hosts, such as webshells, unexpected child processes of the Confluence service, and unusual outbound connections.

9.8100% KEV ransomware PoC ×2
  • Atlassian Confluence Server
  • Atlassian Confluence Data Center
largetens of thousands of internet-exposed instances (public scan counts of roughly 60,000-90,000 Confluence Server/Data Center hosts around the June 2022…
Full article482 words · extracted from therecord.media · click to collapse

Ransomware groups and nation-state actors have begun exploiting a widespread zero-day vulnerability in all supported versions of Atlassian Confluence Server and Data Center unveiled late last month, according to Microsoft. 

Microsoft’s security team took to Twitter on Friday to say they have seen widespread exploitation of CVE-2022-26134, which was officially patched by Atlassian on June 3

Multiple adversaries and nation-state actors, including DEV-0401 and DEV-0234, are taking advantage of the Atlassian Confluence RCE vulnerability CVE-2022-26134. We urge customers to upgrade to the latest version or apply recommended mitigations: https://t.co/C3CykQgrOJ

— Microsoft Security Intelligence (@MsftSecIntel) June 11, 2022

Microsoft released its own guidance on the issue “to help customers determine and remediate the impact of this vulnerability, possible exploitation, and related payloads and other malicious activity in their networks.”

“In many cases impacted devices have been observed with multiple disparate instances of malicious activity, including extensive device and domain discovery, and the deployment of payloads like Cobalt Strike, web shells, botnets like Mirai and Kinsing, coin miners, and ransomware,” Microsoft explained. 

“In particular, we observed the CVE-2022-26134 being exploited to download and deploy the Cerber2021 ransomware.”

Cerber2021 is a relatively minor player among ransomware gangs, emerging in November with versions that can be used in attacks on Windows and Linux, according to cybersecurity researchers with MalwareHunter.

At least one victim took to Twitter to note that they were hit with the Cerber2021 ransomware through the Atlassian bug.

Our company updated #confluence not long ago, but now we were also a victim of this ransomware, that gained access 99% through our #confluence installation I think that was not updated regularly! What a shit!!

— Hans (@Svenholm6) June 5, 2022

Researchers at Swiss cybersecurity firm Prodraft told Bleeping Computer last week that the AvosLocker ransomware has also been seen exploiting the bug. The company that discovered the vulnerability, Volexity, said it has seen state-backed hackers in China exploiting it. 

Censys researchers said they found around 9,325 services across 8,347 distinct hosts running some version of Atlassian Confluence earlier this month.

“Of those services, most Confluence versions we identified were v7.13.0 (1,137 hosts), v7.13.2 (690 hosts), and v7.13.5 (429 hosts); and if the advisory is accurate, all of these versions are susceptible to this new attack,” said Mark Ellzey, senior security researcher at Censys.

The Censys dashboard shows most instances are in the U.S., China and Germany, with each country having at least 1,000 vulnerable hosts.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a warning about the bug and immediately added it to its catalog of known exploited vulnerabilities

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Jonathan Greig

is a Breaking News Reporter at Recorded Future News. Jonathan has worked across the globe as a journalist since 2014. Before moving back to New York City, he worked for news outlets in South Africa, Jordan and Cambodia. He previously covered cybersecurity at ZDNet and TechRepublic.

Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://therecord.media/microsoft-ransomware-groups-nation-states-exploiting-atlassian-confluence-vulnerability